23 May 2012

15queenstreet has published my blog post on behalf of Green Drinks, a group of green-minded people in Colchester, about our tour of the Apricot Centre organic market garden on Saturday 21 April. It is at: www.15queenstreet.org/post/23483386691

21 May 2012

There is a comparison that politicians continually make, which is that at home we have to balance our books: what is wrong with that analogy?
PAUL KRUGMAN: What’s wrong is that we are an economy, not a family, … your spending is my income, and my spending is your income. And if we all try to slash spending at the same time, the result is that all of our income falls. The result is that we go into a depression, and we end up worse off.

17 May 2012

The Watergate scandal of 1972 is
generally assumed to be the classic example of a vigorous and feisty free press
defending the constitution and bringing down a corrupt regime. What is still
virtually unknown is that another huge campaign of political subversion came to
light at the same time. This was the FBI Cointelpro program of bugging, theft,
sabotage and political assassination under four presidents.

The reason Watergate was headline
news was that one half of US political power, the Republicans, took on the
other half, the Democrats. The scandal demonstrates that powerful interests in
the US are capable of defending themselves against attack. By contrast, the
targets of the FBI Cointelpro (Counterintelligence Program) were leftists,
feminists, Communists, the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panther Party. When
minority movements without power are attacked, the facts go unreported.

Notes

Watergate

The Watergate scandal began with
the burglary in June 1972 of the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate
building in Washington DC, which was followed by the Nixon administration's
attempt to cover up its involvement, and ended with the resignation of
President Nixon in August 1974.

Political assassination

At dawn on 4 December 1969,
21-year-old Fred Hampton, a leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was
shot dead in his bed at home in Chicago by armed police.

“The FBI began COINTELPRO—short for
Counterintelligence Program—in 1956 to disrupt the activities of the Communist
Party of the United States. In the 1960s, it was expanded to include a number
of other domestic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers
Party, and the Black Panther Party.” http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro

Further reading and viewing

Manufacturing Consent: The
Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 1988), by Edward S. Herman and
Noam Chomsky, concluding chapter.

8 May 2012

This year is the 50th anniversary of the US invasion of South Vietnam: the worst atrocity in the post war period. It killed millions of people and destroyed four countries. There is hardly a word about it in the media. It's like it didn’t happen. To explain why this 50th anniversary is so
important, here is an extract from Afghanistan
and South Vietnam, a 1984 essay by Noam Chomsky (quoted in The Chomsky Reader, p224).
Chomsky contrasts the way that mainstream history recognises that the Soviet
Union invaded Afghanistan in 1980, but does not recognise that the US ever
invaded South Vietnam, in the one case rejecting, and in the other case
allowing the excuse that the invaders were invited in by the government of
their client regime.In 1962, the US attacked South Vietnam. In that year,
President Kennedy sent the US Air Force to attack rural South Vietnam, where
more than 80 percent of the population lived, as part of a program intended to
drive several million people to concentration camps (called “strategic
hamlets”), where they would be surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards and
“protected” from the guerrillas who, we conceded, they were willingly
supporting. … In the following years, the US continued to resist every attempt
at peaceful settlement and in 1964 began to plan the ground invasion of South
Vietnam which took place in early 1965, accompanied by bombing of North Vietnam
and an intensification of the bombing of the South, at triple the level of the
more publicized bombing of the North. The US also extended the war to Laos,
then Cambodia. ...

For the past twenty-two years, I have been searching
to find some reference in mainstream journalism or scholarship to an American
invasion of South Vietnam in 1962 (or ever), or an American attack against
South Vietnam, or American aggression in Indochina – without success. There is
no such event in history. Rather, there is an American defense of South Vietnam
against terrorists supported from outside (namely, from Vietnam), a defense that
was unwise, the doves maintain.

(extract
from Afghanistan and South Vietnam, 1984, The Chomsky Reader, p224)

3 May 2012

Trotsky
was the one who laboured to destroy and undermine the popular organizations of
workers in the Soviet Union, the factory councils and soviets, [and he was the one] who wanted to subordinate
the working class to the will of the maximum leader and to institute a program
of militarization of labor in the totalitarian society that he and Lenin were
constructing. That was the real Trotsky – not only the Trotsky who sent his
troops to Kronstadt and wiped out Makhno’s peasant forces once they were no
longer needed to fend off the Whites, but the Trotsky who, from the very first
moment of access to power, moved to undermine popular organizations and to
institute highly coercive structures in which he and his associates would have absolute
authority, with absolute submission of the working population to these leaders.
That was the essential doctrine of Trotskyism in power, whatever he may have
said before or after.- from interview in The Chomsky Reader, p41, Pantheon Books 1987. PS Most of my life I’ve seen Trotsky as the revolutionary hero of the 1917 revolution contrasted with the betrayer and villain, Stalin. No doubt this mainly derives from Animal Farm. Chomsky's pithy critique changes my view.

About Me

On Facebook and @robbiespenceuk and roadlesstraveller - blog started 2010 as somewhere to put facts, comments and thoughts (mostly other people’s) about history, politics, philosophy, economics and religion, before I forget them and before I bore my family with them. A commonplace book: a scrapbook of jottings as used for centuries as a memory aid. Themes include language and truth, especially dissident truth, which includes a lot of Noam Chomsky. The name ‘roadlesstraveller’ comes from the book by M Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled, which had a huge influence on the resurgence of New Age spirituality in the 1980s.